Project Members

Across the many disciplines that research the human past, all too often overlooked is how linguistics too can open up its own ‘window on the past’, in many respects just as surely as can our genes, or the ‘material culture’ that our ancestors left behind for archaeologists, or even early historical records. But these disparate data sources, and the analysis methods corresponding to each, are all very different from each other, and each can uncover but a fraction of the full story. And while that should in principle only make the various disciplines all the more complementary, in practice the sub‑plots seem to contradict one another as often as they concur. Still, there was only one past, so our common ultimate goal must be to converge our disparate, partial perspectives on a more holistic understanding, coherent across all of our disciplines, of what really went on in human prehistory.

This research theme aspired to contribute particularly from the linguistic angle — and in each of the two cross-disciplinary directions:

Other disciplines have much to gain from what linguistics can tell us of (pre)history, in ways that they often appreciate too little. A key objective here is to contribute to a better understanding outside linguistics of precisely how, and how much, the languages we speak can tell us about our origins.

Conversely, even for linguistics, to interpret what the language record really means for our past necessarily calls for a sound grasp of the basic tenets, findings and insights of its fellow disciplines, and all that they entail for how linguists should interpret their own record of the past. Certainly, that record can only safely be read when set coherently within the broader contexts of human population prehistory.

This research theme targeted both of these audiences, and explicitly aimed to foster and facilitate this much-needed cross-disciplinary interaction. It did so firstly through publications co-authored and co-edited with specialists in disciplines other than linguistics, both within and outside mpi‑eva, and especially with Prof. Colin Renfrew and Dr David Beresford-Jones, both at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. Publications were targeted, moreover, at a wide range of venues across the disciplines, amongst them: Current Anthropology, the Cambridge World Prehistory (CUP), Encyclopaedia of Global Human Migration (Wiley), Encyclopaedia of Global Archaeology (Springer), Handbook of Historical Linguistics (Routledge), Proceedings of the Royal Society (B), Human Biology, American Journal of Human Biology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Secondly, this research theme has convened a series of explicitly cross-disciplinary symposia and conferences on population prehistory, in this case with a particular regional focus on the Andean region, one of the earth’s rare hearths of agriculture and civilisation, but hitherto especially understudied from an explicitly cross-disciplinary perspective. Publications within this focus included the proceedings volumes Archaeology and Language in the Andes (British Academy/OUP, 2012) and History and Language in the Andes (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011)

As illustrations of specific themes within this broad topic, just two example cross-disciplinary topics are:

The much debated farming/language dispersals hypothesis, within the wider issues of whether broad worldwide patterns in linguistic diversity and relatedness might still retain some signal of the likewise debated Neolithic ‘Revolution’, and teasing apart proximate vs. ultimate causation in language dispersals.

How our languages offer pointers to human migrations, from identifiable small-scale movements such as the forced ‘resettlements’ within the Inca Empire, to the broadest patterns in language diversity, relatedness, divergence and convergence on a global scale.

Conferences/Symposia Organised within this Research Theme

11–13 Sept. 2008

Archaeology and Linguistics in the Andes, McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge.

15 Sept. 2008

History and Linguistics in the Andes, Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London.

16 Sept. 2008

The Prehistory of the Andes (public lectures day), British Museum, London.